The Strangely Beautiful Tale Of Miss Percy Parker (28 page)

“Oh, dear God, what have we done…?” Rebecca sobbed.

“Phoenix help us. And Percy, forgive me—” Alexi gasped, staring into the gaping hole where a dank dungeon of souls awaited command.

Lucy turned to the ghastly host. “Come, come! Come back to your beloved lost world and make noise at last! Be as loud as you like!” she called into the darkness, before whirling back to The Guard, licking her lips. “And imagine just such a release happening all over the world—it occurs as we speak!”

Vile spirits began to pour from the wall, as if a gurgling sewer pipe of eternity had been unclogged and refuse now flowed free. Alexi pictured the horror of other orifices vomiting such phantasmagoria around the world, with no one there to stop the spillage, and he felt a wave of defeat, worse even than the snakes that suffocated him.

“Oh, Alexi,” Lucy said, staring down at him, her eyes once again emerald. More snakes slithered round her head, caressed her cheeks and slid down her body. “Forget that weakling girl. You and I were meant to traverse the ages together. Come. Taste of me. I’ve been so lonely and neglected. Just like you. Do you remember what you used to be? So magnificent! Wisdom and Light, the very Balance itself! But ever since you were foolish enough to fall in love, when you lost your lady and burned to ashes, you understand nothing but loneliness and pathetic human pain. What a humiliating fall.”

She crouched so that her face was level with his. “I will cure it all, Balance be damned,” she murmured in one of his ears. The sounds of his choking friends filled the other.

Percy’s throat constricted. She stumbled down the stairs to the ground floor, tearing around the corner to see the open chapel door ahead at the end of the hallway. A new sensation swelled within her, a heat beyond her high temperature, a seething power that obliterated her weakness and infused her with unknown strength. The throes of her heart began to clear into a sea of singing, wind and peace. And her hands—Percy suddenly knew she could command any force before her, through her light, through her revived power.

“What am I?” she murmured, “And what am I sent to do here?”

Ancient words of a tongue she had never spoken yet always knew were suddenly on her lips, a stream of blessings and curses all at once. She stumbled as if pushed into the white, empty chapel of Athens, but there everything seemed as it always did: the plain altar was draped in white cloth, the stained-glass angels stood silent sentry. But a sound grew in the silence, originating at the altar—a tearing sound—and her blood chilled.

A dark, gaping maw of a door began as a small square and grew before her, obliterating the sight of the altar for its dense blackness and wisps of dancing blue flame—so much like the vision she’d drawn in Alexi’s classroom! Terrible sounds could be heard emanating from inside. Percy turned to the feather. It bobbed, impatient, swelled and suddenly burst apart, leaving only smoke. There was a cry from beyond the portal threshold.

“Alexi!” Percy realized.

The sound of his strained, faltering voice caused her to run forward, heedless of what might await her below, and she threw herself into the void.

The Guard tried to murmur curses, benedictions and prayers, but they couldn’t connect to wield their collective power. They, despite experiment and the best of intentions, had failed. Through their mortal weakness, that chink in the armor of their every incarnation, a wound birthed anarchy. Malevolent spirits poured through the seal, wailing and cackling, anxious to terrorize the populace of the world’s fulcrum city, to tip the balance from sanity to chaos and shatter divisions between journeys of the human spirit. All the while, an ancient foe, that chimerical hellhound, shifted his canine forms and waited, stoking his ravenous appetite.

“Why resist?” Lucille cried. “We don’t have to fight anymore. All debts will clear and we’ll begin anew. This was, at first, supposed to be about her, since Master lost his damnable bride again. Sending his faithful dog, I encouraged the beast to search out whores, expecting to find his errant girl in good company. Pity there were so many to choose from.”

“Demon, what on earth—?” Alexi broke free of the serpent around his neck and leaped to his feet, diving forward to clamp his hands around Lucille’s delicate throat.

Unhurried, she placed a finger on his forehead and he was again on his knees, as if his blood were suddenly turned to lead. “All politics, love and antique fables. But none of that old news matters. Now that we’re together and there’s something more than an ancient, pitiful love affair at stake, now that you’ll join me—”

“Never!” Alexi cried.

“Truly?” Lucy pouted softly, her snakes undulating. “You’re such a lovely man. I’d hate to lose a mind like yours.”

“I knew you were never one of us, demon witch,” Alexi spat.

Lucy sighed. Insects poured suddenly from every crack in the walls of the sacred space. Screams were issued from the faltering company who could draw breath, for arachnids,
roaches and beetles crawled indiscriminately over marble floor, petticoats, arms and legs.

“Tell whomever you serve that we do The Grand Work, not that of the devil!” Alexi cried.

“Don’t you remember
anything?
” Lucy bellowed in a harpylike shriek. “There is no ‘devil.’ There is no ‘hell.’ There is only Unrest. There is no down, only sideways; the transparent beside the opaque, and a thin wall to separate them. I’m so damn sick of fallacies!”

Josephine and Jane had slipped into unconsciousness, were held up solely by their serpentine tethers; the rest were fading. Alexi supposed oblivion was best, for spiders crawled over them in a most wretched manner. “Whatever suffices for hell—wherever there be suffering and horror—go there, where you belong!” He lashed out with his last bit of strength.

“And I was trying to be so kind,” Lucy murmured as insects scurried up her skirts.

The entire room around them burst into true and harmful flame, not the blue fire of their Work, but an inferno that would ignite and burn their bodies. Michael and Rebecca tried to clasp hands, to wake the others into prayer and power, but all effort was futile. Spirits bent on harassing the living kept entering their world, floating through the fire, jaws wide with insatiable hunger. The world would be overrun; there would never again be peace.

Lucy’s snakes were poised to strike, mouths wide and ready, fangs dripping. The encircling blaze was closing in. “What a pity your lover never did find you this life around!” she giggled. “Maybe it was that unfortunate Miss Parker, after all. I wish she were here; I’d have liked to show her this final scene, this end to your nauseating epic drama once and for all. I did think once I brought you to your knees she’d come running. Ah well. She’s a coward, I suppose.”

She took a moment to stare around at the foundering
companions, shook her head and shrugged. “Well, mortal arbiters between life and death, foolish romantics—sorry, remnants of a charred, dead god and his friends—your ends have come! It’s time for you to cross the river!”

“NO.”

The female voice boomed behind them, and an amazing, blinding white form burst into view at the threshold of the altar door. After her bare white feet stepped into the space, the portal snapped shut with a thunderclap.

Eyes blazing like stars, hair wild and raging, snowy arms outstretched and glistening with light as her thin white gown whipped in the wind of her own power, Persephone Parker descended through fire and entered the circle where Lucy stood staring, struck dumb and quizzical. The spiders scattered and the dog squealed, tucking incorporeal tails between its legs. The inferno vanished.

Lifting a hand, every muscle in her compact form taut with energy, Percy spoke, and her words cast a marvelous echo. “Demon, you’ll not destroy my world!”

The serpents retracted, and The Guard fell to the floor, free. Lucille scowled.

Alexi stared up in desperate wonder as his beloved stood before him, the answer to his prayers, radiant from within. His friends began to rouse and stared on in awe.

Percy looked around at the spirits madly careening about the space. She frowned then admonished, “Go home.” Her upraised hand closed into a fist. The pin between worlds roared, stone on stone, as it ground against the floor. Commanded, it lifted, shuddering and shedding debris as it began to twist back into place.

Everything reacted. The spirits shrieked, but their disquieting noises were audible only to Percy, who winced yet remained stalwart. As if pulled backward by strings, the horde was drawn one by one back into the black hole. Clawing and screaming, angry spectres were sucked again into the neth
erworld, blinking out, unable to shake London loose as they wished. And once the errant spirits were reclaimed, the tunnel closed with a resounding
Shhhh;
the fulcrum upon which the entire Balance hung slid back into place with a final stony and metallic crunch. The earth shuddered and settled, once again sealed.

A strange sound erupted from Percy’s throat, an ancient, beautiful command that surprised her as she sang it. Obeying, a new door opened. A vertical, rectangular portal swung into place directly behind Lucy, opening to a dark and indeterminate realm, where dim figures waited in the vast shadows beyond, patiently in formation.

“Oh,” Elijah murmured sheepishly. “That door!”

Up from the base of the opening came a finger bone, then another. Skeletal hands began clawing at the edges of this threshold, scrabbling and clicking upon one another as they sought purchase.

Lucy turned and pursed her lips. “How dare you? Who do you think you are?”

“Who do you say that I am?”
Percy asked in a murmur that made everything tremble.

Michael stirred. “You are the one whose coming was foretold,” he murmured. Percy turned to him, her face shining with love.

Lucy crossed her arms. “So it is you after all. A fine mess you’ve gotten us all into. What the hell do you expect to do now?” she demanded, her crown of snakes slithering and hissing.

Percy laughed, her inner light brightening like a fresh ray of sun. “To settle the score!” she cried, her confident words pouring forth; a mysterious vintage.

Suddenly, her head was thrown back. Percy’s body arched. Her mouth fell open and a painful, feminine gasp flew from her pale lips as a shaft of blinding blue-white light impaled her body in a humming cylinder. The column of incandes
cence, floor to ceiling, pierced Percy’s body at the sternum and held her just above the floor, arched in agony and radiance; an illuminated butterfly transfixed by a pin.

After a moment, Percy recovered herself. Throwing a vanquishing arm out toward her adversary, she cried a brief command in that ancient tongue she was speaking for the first time, her voice containing an echo older than itself.

Lucy pouted. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to—”

A wave of light and power exploded from Percy’s form in a deafening gust of blue flame and angelic chords, and it sent Lucy sprawling back toward the portal, which pulled her like a magnet. The insects and arachnids Lucy summoned were sucked in as well, carried like tiny leaves in a gale. The hellhound followed, its many heads howling in defeat and punishment.

At the threshold of the portal, loosing a wretched squeal, the thing known as Lucy began to harden. Her skin greyed and froze like stone. Fissures appeared. Her face cracked and split. An arm broke away. Her body disintegrated, falling in a heap of hissing dust that was drawn ash by ash into the deep nothing. The skeletal fingers around the sides of the portal clutched at her particles, emitting a millennial rattling until each speck was consumed by their scrabbling hands. Everything disappeared inside, and only the open portal remained.

Percy floated toward the door, where she alone could dimly make out figures reaching for her. Light hummed around and within her body. Her arms hovered at her sides, and her thin gown clung to her flesh like gauze. Eyes fixed on this entryway to a foreign world, in a body not entirely her own, she drifted nearer the portal’s edge, unsure where she was meant to go.

“Alexi,” she whimpered, “take me away from this unbelievable scene. I want to be with you…” She forced her head down to gaze at him, pleading.

“Percy,” he choked out, scrambling to his feet, tears
streaming down his face. He whirled to face his companions. “Now, do you see?”

Stunned, he and the rest of The Guard watched Percy, wrapped in light, drift closer to this new and unknown door. They could hear water lapping within.

Alexi’s senses returned. “Persephone, you mustn’t enter! None of our kind have ever been able to cross such a threshold and return with their wits! Please, come away—”

“Alexi, help me,” she cried in return, reaching out a shaking hand.

He rushed forward, knowing through and through that his future was her, no matter what the future might be.

The moment he touched her fingers he cried out, pulled immediately up and into the light. Their eyes now level, Alexi and Percy floated in close proximity. They put their arms around each other with a sigh from their souls. Their arms could not clutch each other close enough.

The moment they sealed their embrace, the portal shut, leaving their sacred space at last closed. A tether of light began winding like ivy from inside Percy’s pounding heart and into Alexi’s.

“Darling…” He pressed his head against her bosom, directly into the shaft of brightest light. Percy’s arms slid around his neck, and she pressed her trembling lips to his head.

The others scrambled to their feet. Taking hands hastily, still choking and shaking, The Guard began to murmur a gentle incantation of praise and thanksgiving. The wind that was already present in the room turned sweet, a musical caress.

There came a whimper from Percy’s throat, fever overtaking her once more. What burst from within, she didn’t know or understand how to control. Her body still felt on fire, and her fever poured forth in light. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep for years.

A cataclysm had occurred after all, justifying the madness
that had led her to this moment, the horsemen on the horizon and the cracked sky. Now, the sound of dogs barking was gone. The foul air, too. The flashing visions were gone, and all the demons. But her consciousness was slipping. Percy’s mortal weakness was giving way beneath the strain. More than mere humanity coursed through her veins, but in the end, her veins were human and had limits.